Something especially Quaker
Laurie Michaelis reports on conversations with Quakers about their experience of the climate negotiations
Friends have made vital contributions to the environmental movement. Canadian Quakers Irving and Dorothy Stowe were co-founders of Greenpeace. British Friends have been closely involved in organisations from the Green Party to the Transition movement.
While individual Quakers, however, have been clear about their green leadings, corporately we have sometimes faltered. Yet I believe careful discernment is bearing fruit in a witness that really is born of love. This is especially evident in the work of the Quaker United Nations Office (QUNO) with the UN climate negotiations.
Concern
Britain Yearly Meeting, which was then named London Yearly Meeting, produced strongly worded minutes on the ‘stewardship of God’s creation’ in 1988 (Quaker faith & practice 25.02). Work on ‘Justice, Peace and the Integrity of Creation’ was taken up in 1989 but laid down in 1994 amid general cuts. In subsequent discussions about sustainability as Quaker testimony there were doubts. Was this truly from the Spirit? Were we motivated by fear or love?
In Britain Yearly Meeting we finally united with the Concern in 2011 in our Canterbury ‘Minute 36’ commitment to become a ‘low carbon sustainable community’. Climate change and sustainability are now a core part of the witness of Friends, Meetings and the centrally managed work. We are still finding our way forward, learning what is Quaker about our commitment.
There has been a similar trajectory in Quaker international work. QUNO was closely involved in preparations for the 1972 UN Conference on the Human Environment, held in Stockholm, and the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. This involvement tapered off in the 1990s. A Quaker presence at UN sustainability negotiations was sustained by the North American network of Friends sharing a green concern, now named Quaker Earthcare Witness (QEW).
In 2009 Mary Gilbert was among nine Friends who attended the Copenhagen Conference under the auspices of QEW. As she wrote afterwards: ‘Ordinary people who showed up in Copenhagen thinking they might be able to add anything substantive were out of luck. Nonetheless, it was important that we be there representing the numbers and commitment of civil society demanding a FAB outcome… Fair, Ambitious and Binding.’
Quiet diplomacy
The Copenhagen talks fell far short of expectations. Amid global recession the media and politics seemed to turn against effective action on climate change. There was much talk of a ‘hiatus’ in global warming, although this is now discredited. Remarkably, it was in this context that Britain Yearly Meeting made its Canterbury ‘Minute 36’ Commitment. And it was about this time that QUNO Geneva began to think seriously about engaging with the climate process. Staff attended the talks and found a real need and opportunity for a Quaker contribution centred on ‘quiet diplomacy’ – creating opportunities for negotiators to listen to each other.
With several weeks of UNFCCC (UN Framework Convention on Climate Change) negotiations every year since the 1990s, much time is spent reiterating well-known national positions. During my visit to the negotiations in June I spoke to Rachel Berger, a British Friend who used to attend the talks as part of her job with the NGO Practical Action. Rachel went this time as a volunteer for QUNO and followed the discussions on agriculture, her area of expertise. She says: ‘What surprised me in the past was that delegates did not know the real view of another country. You could have conversations with one and then the other. You could say, “did you know so-and-so thinks that”, and they would say “no”.’
Jonathan Woolley, director of QUNO Geneva, says: ‘The original approaches were partly by negotiators. The trust Quakers have built up over the years seems to be known by some. Bringing people together, encouraging listening, understanding across diverse and conflicted negotiating groups is something especially Quaker.’ QUNO appointed Lindsey Fielder Cook to do the work of building relationships and creating listening spaces, working with negotiators and the UNFCCC Secretariat in Bonn, where she lives. In the last two years QUNO has held nine off-the-record dinners for negotiators.
Listening spaces
Jonathan stays closely involved. He says: ‘We’re now approached to share ideas, but particularly to search for how to help people listen to each other.’ He has a cler vision on how he sees the balance between advocacy work – speaking out for Quaker values – and quiet diplomacy:
‘Quaker fellow travellers are involved, observing in order to campaign, apply pressure, lobby maybe on particular issues. We are able to do quiet diplomacy because others are doing the campaigning. If nobody else was saying tough and worrying things we could not necessarily do what we do.
‘We see our role in QUNO as complementary, to build up listening and understanding without pushing a particular point of view. We wouldn’t do that if we saw it going in directions against what Quakers believe in, but we don’t see any danger of that, quite the contrary. We find it very counterproductive to hector people. We find they have within them all that truth about the need for fairness and the need to listen to each other.’
The climate negotiations are different in many ways from other areas of UN work where QUNO is involved:
‘There are many different streams of negotiation and the UNFCCC is very complex. In some other international processes there are just one or two streams, even when the issues are big. In most of those the perceived adversary is another party who has nuclear weapons or doesn’t respect the human rights of certain groups or whatever it might be. Here the changing climate cannot be convinced. The climate will go on changing if we don’t take action.’
Interconnected issues
Jonathan is clearly passionate about this work. He sees climate politics as deeply interconnected with other issues:
‘There are so many resentments, stretching back into history. I don’t want to say just colonial history but a lot of it is about that. It’s of no use that parties are playing off against each other. Everything, potentially, about the world we’ll live in, in the next decades, the next century, the next several centuries, is contained here.
‘There still seems to be an underlying assumption in so many states that a new economy, renewable energy and greener lifestyles will be economically prejudicial or painful. Fortunately, many respected thinkers are now saying that’s not so. The Quaker view from the Canterbury Minute 36 is that we’re moving beyond our comfort zones, but these are positive things that we look for joyously.’
He is upbeat about the way the negotiations have been developing this year:
‘The atmosphere is more positive. That comes out of the preparation meetings in Geneva in February. There were several procedural barriers last year. There was a difficult Conference of the Parties in Lima, quite well resolved by the presidency, but there was a need to move forward. People are getting focused on negotiating, but time is short. The negotiations have a tendency to leave things to the last minute.’
And Rachel Berger gives QUNO some of the credit: ‘I think the QUNO dinners have been able to make delegates feel safe to talk with their equivalents in other countries, to open up a bit and gain a better understanding of what might be behind a country’s position. There’s enormous scope for that.’
Laurie is environment correspondent for the Friend.
Future articles will address what happens at the QUNO dinners and ask how Friends can engage locally and nationally in the lead-up to the Paris Climate Conference.
